Most people are aware of deepfakes, yet their ability to distinguish them from reality is barely better than a coin flip.

KEY FINDINGS

The detection deficit

Brazil presents a unique landscape of high exposure combined with moderate conceptual awareness. An overwhelming 80% of Brazilian respondents state they have encountered deepfakes online, making them vastly more exposed than users in the US and the UK, where only around 60% report such encounters.

However, despite this high encounter rate, only 67% of adults in Brazil are familiar with the term "deepfake" itself. This sits in the middle of other countries – higher than the US (63%) but lagging behind the UK (74%).

Are you familiar with the term ‘deepfake’?

There's a unique dynamic at play: Brazil is a market where digital fraud and social engineering are a persistent part of daily life.

And a massive 80% of the population has encountered deepfakes online. Yet, their conceptual familiarity with the terminology sits moderately at 67%. The problem is that high exposure without understanding doesn't reduce risk – it amplifies it. If you encounter manipulated media constantly but don't fully grasp the underlying technology, you're still highly vulnerable.

This research shows that as AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from reality – and we're already there – the human eye alone is no longer a reliable line of defense.

When respondents were tested on their ability to distinguish between real and AI-generated visuals, performance across all markets was extremely low.

Brazilian respondents achieved a mean detection score of 0.08, which slightly outperforms the US and UK (both at 0.07). However, a score of 0.08 indicates that participants performed only a tiny fraction better than random chance.

The Brazilian respondents' distribution of results further highlights this challenge:

Around half of the users in Brazil (and the US) are confident in their ability to identify deepfakes, which is notably higher than the 44% confidence rate observed in the UK.

However, Brazil harbors a uniquely dangerous vulnerability. In the US and UK, higher confidence generally correlates with higher accuracy. In Brazil, this is not the case: higher confidence in one's own ability to spot deepfakes does not come with higher accuracy.

Furthermore, across the markets, approximately 7% of users are classified as "high-risk". These individuals:

• Demonstrate low detection accuracy (scoring below chance level)
• Express high confidence in their abilities
• Rarely or never verify suspicious content

The high-risk segment is generally less common among the oldest age group in Brazil and the UK. The US is an exception, meaning older Americans are just as likely to fall into this category. Respondents with a university education are less likely to fall into the "high-risk" category of users who are overly confident but inaccurate.

Approximately 7% of users are classified as high-risk 

Our research reveals what may be the most dangerous dynamic in the deepfake era: a unique confidence-competence gap.

"Around half of Brazilian respondents believe they can reliably spot manipulated media – yet their actual detection accuracy tells a very different story, and alarmingly, higher confidence does not translate to higher accuracy in this market. This creates a false sense of security that fraudsters are primed to exploit. When people believe they can't be fooled, they stop looking for the signs.

Most concerning is the roughly 7% of users who fall into what we classify as the 'high-risk' segment – people who perform poorly at detection, are highly confident they'd catch a fake, and rarely verify suspicious content.

For businesses, the implication is clear: any organization that still relies on customer self-attestation is inheriting this vulnerability directly."

KEY FINDINGS

User behaviors and concerns

Creating AI visuals is highly widespread in Brazil. An impressive 59% of Brazilian respondents report having created AI-generated images or videos (26% multiple times, 33% rarely). This makes Brazilians significantly more active in AI generation than Americans (49%) and British respondents (38%).

Additionally, while male users are generally more likely to create AI visuals in other countries, there is no gender disparity among AI creators in Brazil. Despite this high level of hands-on experience, interacting with AI tools provides only a limited advantage when identifying manipulated content.

"The reality for businesses is that relying solely on manual review processes or customer self-attestation introduces significant vulnerabilities, especially as threats become more sophisticated. While automation and technology-led verification should be the default to ensure scale, consistency, and speed, the focus should be on strategically integrating human judgment only at critical decision points – where depth, experience, and intuition improve outcomes."

When attempting to identify fakes, Brazilian users largely rely on visual cues, slightly more frequently than users in the US and UK. The most common indicators cited by Brazilian respondents include:

• Unnatural-looking skin (64%)
• Unnatural movement or expressions in videos (63%)
• Oddities in appearance, like hair, teeth, or eyes (57%)

While these cues may have been useful in earlier stages of deepfake development, advances in AI have made them increasingly unreliable. Modern deepfakes are capable of replicating these details with high accuracy, reducing the effectiveness of these strategies.

Additionally, the research shows that checking content more frequently does not necessarily improve accuracy, suggesting that users lack a structured or effective approach to verification.

Brazilians show the highest level of concern across all surveyed countries regarding the real-world impact of deepfakes. Regardless of age or educational background, the leading fears in Brazil are:

Unlike the United States, where respondents maintain relatively high trust in digital services, the majority of respondents in Brazil (and the UK) have strong doubts about social media platforms' ability to identify AI-generated content.

When nearly 9 in 10 Brazilians say they're concerned about deepfake-driven personal fraud, that's not a hypothetical fear, it reflects a threat that's already materializing.

"We're seeing synthetic identities used to open fraudulent accounts and authorize transactions. Online businesses sit squarely in the crosshairs because they are where identity, money, and trust converge. Every customer onboarding flow, every account recovery process, every high-value transaction is now a potential attack surface for AI-generated fraud.

What makes this particularly urgent for the Brazilian market is the combination of sky-high concern and a strong lack of trust in platforms' ability to manage AI-generated content. For financial institutions and tech companies, the answer isn't to merely reassure customers – it's to earn that trust through action. That means deploying AI-powered biometric authentication that can verify a real person in real time, detect synthetic media at the point of interaction, and do so without relying on the customer to spot the fake themselves."

CONCLUSION

The path forward

Deepfakes are getting better

In the age of generative AI, the most uncomfortable truth this research reveals is not that deepfakes are getting better – it's that human detection was never a sole defense. Brazilian consumers present a unique profile:

The gap between what people believe they can detect and what they actually can is not a knowledge problem that awareness campaigns alone will fix.

It is a structural vulnerability in any system that places the burden of verification solely on the human eye.

For businesses operating in the Brazil market, the implications are immediate and material. Fraud losses tied to synthetic identities already represent billions of dollars annually, and the tools to create convincing fakes are now accessible to anyone with a browser. Meanwhile, the roughly 7% of users who combine poor detection ability with high confidence and low verification habits represent an ever-present soft target that bad actors will continue to exploit.

The most effective defense is one that keeps humans in the loop, empowered by AI systems that detect what the eye cannot.

Methodology overview

The research was conducted by Kantar in February 2026 using an online access panel.

Total sample: 3,000 respondents

• United States: 1,000
• United Kingdom: 1,000
• Brazil: 1,000

Participants were aged 18 to 64, with quotas applied to ensure nationally representative samples in each country based on age, gender, and region. The survey took approximately 9 minutes to complete and included both demographic questions and practical evaluation tasks.

Respondents were asked to assess 16 visuals:

• 8 real
• 8 AI-generated or manipulated

These included:

• Fully AI-generated images
• AI-generated videos
• Faceswap content

To reduce bias, all visuals were presented in randomized order. Participants completed both individual evaluations and direct comparisons between real and fake content. Detection accuracy was calculated using a scoring index that benchmarks performance against a defined chance-level baseline.

About Veriff

Veriff is a global AI-native identity platform that helps organizations build trust online. Leading companies across financial services, marketplaces, mobility, gig economy, and other digital sectors rely on Veriff’s technology to stay compliant, prevent fraud, protect users, and scale globally.

Veriff’s trust infrastructure supports the full customer journey, from verification to ongoing authentication and fraud prevention, with the least friction for honest people. Built for global scale, Veriff helps businesses expand across borders without the complexity of managing identity verification, compliance, and fraud in multiple markets – creating a single source of truth for trusted identities.